Hi and welcome again to another episode of the churchtechcast.com Q&A show. This is is where every week I answer your church tech questions. My name is Paul Alan Clifford; I’m your host. I’d love you to ask your questions, by the way, so just do that below the video. If you’re listening to the audio podcast, that’s cool too, just drop me a line Paul at TrinityDigitalMedia.com.

So Natesarog on YouTube asks:
Hi, thanks for the video. I have ProPresenter 6 for Mac; I can’t seem to get a single slide to show up by itself on the main stage screen. I set it up on my Mac, but it does not show a single slide on the main stage screen. Help!

Okay, so the first thing you need to do is, we need to know: does the Mac see multiple monitors. It needs to see at least two and if you’re using stage display, three. So, first you are going to system preferences, with ProPresenter turned off.

Don’t confuse this with the preferences in ProPresenter. We’re talking on the system level. So we’re going to system preferences. Then we click on displays. The first thing that should pop up is, you should see three tabs at the top. If you only see two, there’s part of the problem, that computer isn’t seeing the second display, but if you see three tabs one of them is called “arrangement”. Click on “arrangement” and then you should see two boxes — one for each display, or three for using stage display. It’s possible though, you want and if you don’t look in the lower left-hand corner and there is a “mirror displays” checkbox. You want to uncheck that. If it’s checked, that’s the cause of the problem. So do that and check your preferences in ProPresenter 6 and make sure the you have these three displays and that name is drug to the display box that indicates the main display. There’s nothing on the control screen, and SD is on the stage display if you have it and that should solve your problem.

James Newman asked me on TrinityDigitalMedia.com:
Paul, I’m a typical rookie trying to get set up to live-stream our church services on our church website. I’m wanting to start small for now we have been recording on a zoom H4N digital recorder. On my PC, I have installed flash media encoder on my MacBook I’d like to use the audio in my live-stream from the Zoom H4n, and the video from the from the DSLR camera. I have a Canon SX 30 IIS camera. I’m not sure if I need a capture card. I tried to plug a USB plug from my Zoom H4N and the USB from my camera. But the flash media live encoder only recognized the Zoom H4N for audio, but not my camera. Do I need to capture card? If so which one would you recommend? Any other suggestions or corrections to what I’ve done would be appreciated. Thanks for your time.

So, as I was looking at it. That camera only outputs 720p and when I say outputs, I mean records. It could be when viewed the output is much less. My T3i for example while it says it outputs 720p or 1080p when you actually plugged in a HDMI cable and plug that into a TV you get both letter-boxed and pillar-boxed and the overlays are difficult to remove. You actually kind have to hack it with Magic lantern.

Now, I don’t know if Magic lantern would work on this camera. I don’t have one of those. I also don’t know if there’s a menu option to remove the overlays but that’s what you would need to do in order to get this to even remotely get 720p on your screen. Now it could be that SD is perfectly fine, but with that said, you’re going to need a capture card the black magic minute…black magic design mini recorder is actually a pretty good one from all I’ve heard and you plug that into the thunderbolt port and once you do that it just shows up as a camera. So that’s what I would suggest that you do is get one of those, plug it in and go from there.

By the way, it’s possible that you’ll get some discrepancy in the capture from the Zoom H4N and mini recorder. If that’s the case try plugging audio directly into the camera and getting audio that way. Though that’s just a good place to start. Hope that helps.

Okay next Ashley via email says:
First, I appreciate the purpose of your email to actually address and get a response from your audience. Secondly, I do have a question. I can’t really find anything on church lighting or set lighting arrangements. Which work best for certain segments like worship of the message what would add some interest to the stage in terms of decoration backdrop or anything else. I honestly don’t know if this is even your area, but would greatly appreciate it if you could respond with some rules or guidelines to explain what is what it even is that I’m supposed to be looking for in lighting and stage design. Thanks for your interest in helping reached the lost through technology and media. Keep on leading others to Him.

Well Ashley, you’re right by thinking it’s no my primary thing. I approach lighting from the video standpoint because I’m primarily a videographer, but stage lighting is a little different animal. But there is a blog that I follow churchstagedesign.com and while they do mostly set stuff, there is some lighting in there. So I think that’s the first place I would look to interact with that community and see if they’ve got some better suggestions as well.

Next Brenda via email asks:
It is Sunday a.m. and we are trying to use ProPresenter. A template has parked itself on the front of every slide. We have deleted the template and it still there. Tried to create a new playlist and it’s still there. Help!

Okay, one thing you need to know about ProPresenter is it’s designed with layers. So if the template layer seems not to be causing the problem, go up a layer to the props layer. Look at the props to make sure you clear out all the props. Look in the props later and see if that solves it.
In talking with you it turned out that it that triggered you to check the mask layer where the problem actually was. So the mask layer is the next place I was going to suggest so that’s typical. If you see something that’s persistent that refuses to be removed check the props layer and the mask layer and see if I the removing those solves the problem.

So I hope that helps you. I hope that one of those questions was one of your questions and you just hadn’t asked it or I hope you’re one of these people. Either way if you’d like to ask more questions by all means do it below the video drop me a line Paul at TrinityDigitalMedia.com or just had to TrinityDigitalMedia.com/contact here you can leave me your question or just use on the contact information I’ve left on that page.

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